The Queer Past Gets Banned on eBay | Hacker News Reader

The Queer Past Gets Banned on eBay

newyorker.com

31 pointsfortran775 comments

NSFW warning: First image in the article shows (slightly obscured) anal penetration in a photo that is a cover of a magazine.

Doesn't bother me, but may not be a safe click for some of you.

I had a childhood friend who was a "Playgirl" centerfold when he was about 20 years old, in the early 80s. I was able, about 15 years ago, to go on eBay and buy the issue he was featured in. It's disturbing to think that today this sale would be blocked by eBay.

> The ban appears to be related to the House’s Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Senate’s Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, known together as fosta-sesta, an effort by victim’s-rights advocates and right-wing activists to crack down on sex work. One feature of the legislative package was to make Web sites liable for hosted content that might “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.”

Yet this is even more disturbing! These sites are being bullied into removing this material, all in the name of "fighting sex trafficking." I've seen xenophobic laws targeting Asian businesses in my area all in the name of "fighting sex trafficking." The place I go to for pedicures has to have "anti trafficking" signs up, and the staff is required to wear name tags as part of compliance with trafficking laws for any business that does massages (you can get a foot massage with a pedicure there).

The same law is having an effect on personals ads hosted in the USA, too. See Craigslist shutting its personals section. Many other personal ad sites now prohibit explicit sexual solicitation. Not because that doesn't suit the tastes of the operator or the users (you could always find places that prohibited that of course); but now because of the human trafficking and pornography laws. If an enslaved person were to have a profile created for them by their enslaver, which solicited explicit sexual information and/or had nude photos, the site operator could be liable for that regarding prostitution/human trafficking, even if it looks like a normal profile. The result is either subscription services with aggressive moderation, or more often simply prohibiting that altogether.

As a gay person, I'm not really a fan of the clickbait title, and also the implication that banning sexually-oriented material bans the totality of "the queer past".

That said, what fucking century am I living in? At some point I hope there is a backlash to the pearl clutching over sexually oriented material, and that banning it all is somehow the way forward to protecting kids.

The article explains that these publications contained non-pornographic information as well, and it’s this history that’s being suppressed as a collateral effect.

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